Will President Trump's Visit to Saudi Arabia Tackle Terrorism and Promote Religious Freedom? - A. Z. Mohamed

by A. Z. Mohamed

Although Trump is right that America should not "dictate to others how to live," he needs to consider how he can "build a coalition of partners" with those whose entire way of life is indelibly linked to the cause and spread of the very extremism, violence and global terrorism that he aims to eradicate.

• A number of recently published books on the history, culture and internal workings of Saudi Arabia cast doubt on the ability of the kingdom to undergo the kind of change required to tackle extremism when its chief aim is to preserve and enhance the power of the royal family.
• The government in Riyadh neither believes in nor permits religious liberty and free speech for its own citizens or for Muslims elsewhere. Indeed, the kingdom's human rights record is abysmal at best.
• Although Trump is right that America should not "dictate to others how to live," he needs to consider how he can "build a coalition of partners" whose entire way of life is indelibly linked to the cause and spread of the very extremism, violence and global terrorism that he aims to eradicate.

As part of his first official trip abroad at the end of May, U.S. President Donald Trump will visit Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy and Brussels, Belgium.

According to a statement released by the White House, Trump's meetings with King Salman and other key figures "will reaffirm the strong partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia and allow the leaders to discuss issues of strategic concern, including efforts to defeat terrorist groups and discredit radical ideologies."

The goal may be commendable, but it is hardly attainable in a country like Saudi Arabia, ruled politically by an absolute monarchy and theologically by Wahhabism, both immensely radical.

Saudi Arabia is ruled politically by an absolute monarchy and theologically by Wahhabism, both immensely radical. Pictured: U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis (left) visits Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud (center) on April 19, 2017 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Image source: Jonathan Ernst - Pool/Getty Images)

In testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs' Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, Georgetown University professor and Middle East expert Daniel Byman explained the "paradox" this presents:

"On the one hand, the Saudi government is a close partner of the United States on counterterrorism. On the other hand, Saudi support for an array of preachers and non-government organizations contributes to an overall climate of radicalization, making it far harder to counter violent extremism."

Byman is not alone in this assessment. A number of recently published books on the history, culture and internal workings of Saudi Arabia cast doubt on the ability of the kingdom to undergo the kind of change required to tackle extremism when its chief aim is to preserve and enhance the power of the royal family.

That the announcement of Trump's trip coincided with the signing of an executive order on "Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty" could not have been more ironic. The government in Riyadh neither believes in nor permits religious liberty and free speech for its own citizens or for Muslims elsewhere. Indeed, the kingdom's human rights record is abysmal at best.

Moreover, during his speech in the Rose Garden to introduce the executive order, Trump said that another reason for his upcoming foreign trip was to "unite Islam, Judaism and Christianity in the common cause of fighting 'intolerance'" -- a claim just as jaw-dropping, given Saudi Arabia's role in the persecution of Christians across the Middle East.

This is not to say that the U.S.-Saudi relationship is not valuable or crucial in many respects. Both countries consider ISIS and al-Qaeda to be serious threats. Neither wants Iran to obtain regional hegemony, while hoping for a Palestinian-Israeli peace deal. Both want to guarantee the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf.

In addition, Saudi Arabia remains a key U.S. investor and trading partner, and is the largest recipient of American-made arms. Even during the years of the Obama administration, when relations were strained, the U.S. provided Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons. Today, the Trump administration is pushing through tens of billions of dollars' worth of arms sales to Riyadh; and garnering American support in its raging conflict against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen is at the top of the Saudi agenda.

In a piece in Foreign Affairs last summer, Professor F. Gregory Gause III -- head of the International Affairs Department at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University -- wrote that the relationship between Washington and Riyadh serves immediate American interests, but in the long term, Saudi Arabia is far from being a faithful and effective partner in battling radical ideologies. The Saudis simply do not have the same values, worldview or strategic vision as their U.S. counterparts.

In his Rose Garden address, Trump said:

"Our task is not to dictate to others how to live but to build a coalition of friends and partners who share the goal of fighting terrorism and bringing safety, opportunity and stability to the war-ravaged Middle East."

Although Trump is right that America should not "dictate to others how to live," he needs to consider how he can "build a coalition of partners" whose entire way of life is indelibly linked to the cause and spread of the very extremism, violence and global terrorism that he aims to eradicate.

A.Z. Mohamed is a Muslim born and raised in the Middle East.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10350/trump-saudi-arabia-visit

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Progressives openly signaling the arrival of political violence as a tactic to obtain power - Thomas Lifson

by Thomas Lifson

Violence can be intoxicating to certain disturbed minds. We have seen Leftist terrorists before.

The message is being sent out loud and clear: the American Left is moving toward violence as a tactic in its quest to grab the political power to which it believes it is entitled. John Daniel Davidson is absolutely correct in his observation that the “The American Left is talking itself into Violence.” He cites a lot of examples. Here is a sample:

Jennifer Carnahan, the new chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, received a torrent of racist hate mail and at least one threat of physical violence that forced her from her home for a weekend. Carnahan, who is Korean-American, was targeted after publically apologizing and calling for the resignation of those responsible for an offensive image posted to the 7th Congressional District Republicans Facebook page.
It didn’t matter that Carnahan didn’t post the image, or that she did everything right. The folks sending the hate mail called her racist, and threw a few racial epithets directly at her for good measure.
Last month, left-wing activists in Oregon caused the cancellation of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade by threatening to drag “fascists” off the parade route—and by fascists, they meant the Republican Party of Multanomah County. In an email, the activists warned, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push those people out as we will not give one inch to groups who espouse hatred toward lgbt, immigrants, people of color or others.”

The signs are everywhere that a mass phenomenon is underway, and is being tolerated: from the failure to suppress antifa armed thugs shutting down political speech in Berkeley 

to nods-and-winks from authority figures. When a revered Civil Rights Era hero, who carries a steel plate in his skull owing to injuries from a police baton, implicitly encourages the ongoing wave of violence, a lot of people take it quite seriously.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., urged students on Saturday to help recreate a sense of hope that has been lost in America today and to participate in civil disobedience if necessary.
In a commencement speech that focused largely on Lewis' life growing up and his involvement in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Lewis ended it with an examination of the current state of affairs and a thinly veiled critique of America under President Trump, whom he did not mention by name. (snip)
Paralleling what he said earlier about getting into the way of things he saw as unjust during the civil rights era, Lewis encouraged his audience to do the same when they leave college.
"Go out there, get in the way, get in trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble and make some noise," he said to cheers.

“Good trouble” is a wonderful (yet horrifying) catch phrase. It is memorable, and readily defensible. Yet in the minds of the violent factions of the left, it can be appropriated to provide blanket permission to misbehave. The expression “good trouble” can be picked up by anyone from nonviolent demonstrators seeking "symbolic arrests" to antifa thugs to (God forbid) potential future Weathermen-like terrorists.

From the standpoint of Lewis, it is not an explicit call to violence, of course. He is citing nonviolent Civil Rights Era heroes, and after all, he is one himself. So he is bulletproof in uttering these words. But his words exist in the context that John Daniel Davidson chronicles.

We face a very threatening situation: large numbers of people have become deranged with TDS, and among them it is statistically certain there will be people inclined to violence due to what we might call pre-existing conditions: crazies looking for a cause or a trigger. So people are acting out, and at the same time, they are told there is “good trouble, necessary trouble” by a secular Civil Rights saint, no matter his personal context in creating the expression. 

Violence can be intoxicating to certain disturbed minds. We have seen Leftist terrorists before. (See Radical Son). I don’t like the volatility of the mixture we face as the Left still cannot reconcile itself to electoral defeat and spirals toward the fringe.

Thomas Lifson

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/05/progressives_openly_signaling_the_arrival_of_political_violence_as_a_tactic_to_obtain_power.html

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Reparations for Jews from Arab Countries Should Be an Integral Part of Any Peace Agreement - Dr. Edy Cohen

by Dr. Edy Cohen

The time has come for these states and their leaders to own up to their misdeeds, apologize for this injustice, and compensate those whose property they stole.

Yemenite Jews walking to Aden, 1949, 

Kluger Zoltan, Israeli National Photo Archive

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 466, May 15, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: No solution for the Palestinian refugee problem is possible so long as justice is not served for the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries.

The Palestinians and their erstwhile international champions are commemorating Nakba Day on May 15. Just as the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin Husseini, the Palestinian Arabs’ leader from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, would habitually condemn the Balfour Declaration from his World War II Berlin headquarters to ingratiate himself with his Nazi masters, so May 15, the date when the British Mandate ended and the state of Israel came into being, has become the day on which the Palestinians’ annually commemorate their self-inflicted “catastrophe” (or Nakba).

No one can ignore the Palestinian refugee problem. Yet no one speaks of the predicament of the larger number of Jews expelled from the Arab states in the wake of Israel’s establishment. Having failed to abort the newly established Jewish state by force of arms, these states took revenge on their own Jewish communities, some of which had lived in those lands way before their Arab/Muslim conquest in the seventh century CE.

About 900,000 Jews of Arab countries were forced to leave their homes, and their properties were summarily expropriated. In some of those countries, primarily Egypt and Iraq, that stolen property is estimated today in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This includes many buildings and hundreds of beautiful synagogues, enterprises, and private assets that were confiscated solely because their owners happened to be Jews.

Those Jews were expelled and/or forced to flee their homelands in fear of their lives. They were subjected to persecution and numerous pogroms, though they had in no way harmed their Arab compatriots – unlike the Palestinian refugees, who fled in the wake of a war of annihilation that their leaders and the Arab regimes had waged.

As part of the recent Arab League summit in Jordan, the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative was revived. It offers Israel normalization with the Arab and Muslim states in return for a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria and the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

Not surprisingly, the statement issued by the summit demands concessions only of Israel. If, however, Jerusalem decides to enter peace talks on the basis of this plan, it must demand an explicit apology from the Arab states that expelled their Jewish citizens in the course of the conflict. Israel must further insist that these Jews be compensated for the loss of their earthly properties and for the suffering attending their expulsion.

Over the course of history, countless peoples have afflicted the Jewish people. Some have apologized, and some have even tried to atone for their misdeeds. For example, the Portuguese and the Spanish have apologized for their persecution of Jews, and now offer passports to all Jews whose families were expelled from those countries, as far back as the Expulsion of 1492. The Germans, who annihilated one-third of the Jewish people, have apologized, signed a reparations agreement with the state of Israel, and compensated numerous Holocaust survivors.

In contrast, the Arab states are not only unwilling to pay compensation to those Jews they expelled, but refuse to acknowledge this atrocity in the first place. The time has come for these states and their leaders to own up to their misdeeds, apologize for this injustice, and compensate those whose property they stole.

Israel can help to redress an historical injustice if it makes it unequivocally clear that it will not sign an agreement on ending the conflict with the Palestinians and/or the Arab states until the issue of the Jewish refugees and their plundered property in the Arab countries is resolved.

As the state of the Jewish people, Israel has a supreme moral duty, along with a right anchored in international law, to demand that the Arab states compensate their past Jewish citizens for the assets and lands that were illegally and unjustifiably wrested from them.

Unfortunately, Israeli governments have thus far ignored this issue altogether. One can only hope that the current and future governments will come to their senses as soon as possible, since no solution for the Palestinian refugee problem is possible so long as justice is not served for the Jewish refugees from the Arab states.

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BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family


Dr. Edy Cohen is author of the book The Holocaust in the Eyes of Mahmoud Abbas (Hebrew).

Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/reparations-jews-arab-countries-integral-part-peace-agreement/

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US, UK, Jordanian forces enter S. Syria - debkaFile

by debkaFile

This push [is] aimed at countering the drive in the last few days by hundreds of Syrian troops, Iranian-backed Shiite militias and Hizballah’s Radwan special forces -- to take over the town of Sabaa Biyar.

US special forces, together with British and Jordanian elite troops, moved into southern Syria late Sunday, May 14. They were acting to counter the Syrian-Iranian scheme to nullify the American plan for posting Jordanian forces in southeastern Syria, [is] which timed for the days before US President Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East. 

The US-led armored force with British and Jordanian units crossed from northern Jordan through the Tanf Border-Crossing between the Hashemite Kingdom, Iraq and Syria, and took up positions capable of consolidating their control of the main road between Palmyra and Baghdad. Some of their moves were coordinated with Israel.

(See map).

This push [is] aimed at countering the drive in the last few days by hundreds of Syrian troops, Iranian-backed Shiite militias and Hizballah’s Radwan special forces, with tanks and heavy equipment, to take over the town of Sabaa Biyar. Located in sparsely desert territory, this town lies 110km west of the Syrian-Iraqi border, 95km north of the Syrian-Jordanian border and 128km east of Damascus.

Its high strategic importance for Tehran, Damascus and Hizballah lies in its command of the border between Syria, Iraq and Jordan and of Highway No. 1 which links the Jordanian capital of Amman with Baghdad.

debkafile’s military sources explain that Damascus and Tehran acted to pre-empt the US-Jordanian-Israeli military operations along the Israeli and Jordanian borders with Syria, lest they lead to the carving out of US-controlled security zones in southern Syria.

Our military sources add that Moscow too eyes the new US-led military movements with mistrust, in view of its potential impact on the Russian plan for four ceasefire zones in Syria, in cooperation with Iranian and Turkish forces. The Russians are accordingly feeding Tehran and Damascus intelligence on the US-led movements.

On Sunday, too, the Israeli Defense Forces launched a large-scale military exercise in the Galilee and Golan regions close to its borders with Syria and Lebanon. The war game may well run over its final date in order to keep a substantial military force poised on along Israel’s northern borders, in case of attempts to disrupt the Trump visits to Saudi Arabia and Israel from May 22 to May 24.

Other military movements in the region this week were taken by the Iraqi army and Iraqi Shiite militias under the command of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers. Iran continued to pour additional troops into Damascus through the Baghdad-Damascus highway, on the one hand, while, on the other, Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi offered Washington two of his army’s divisions, which would be sent into Syria to support US military operations in the southeast.

For the time being, the Trump administration’s plans for an offensive against the Islamic State appear to have been put on a back burner. 


debkaFile

Source: http://debka.com/article/26055/US-UK-Jordanian-forces-enter-S-Syria

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False Claims To US Citizenship - Michael Cutler

by Michael Cutler

Far from a "victimless crime."

Virtually all criminals lie.

Lying is a common tactic used by criminals to conceal their identities, their backgrounds and their crimes.  They lie to cover their tracks, to evade detection and to escape from the reach of the “long arm of the law.”

This is why suspects who are taken into custody are fingerprinted and photographed, to attempt to make certain that the name the suspect provides is truly his/her name.  Often criminals use multiple false identities whether by committing identity theft or fabricating altogether fictitious identities.

In point of fact, the 9/11 Commission found that in the aggregate, the 19 hijackers who participated in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, used more than 300 false identities or variations of false identities to conceal their identities and their movements as they went about their deadly preparations.

The 9/11 Commission also identified other terrorists who had entered the United States in the decade leading up to the attacks of 9/11 and found that the majority of all of these terrorists engaged in multiple forms of immigration fraud.  This was the starting point for my recent article, Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill.

The act of lying is, itself, a crime when it is done in furtherance of other criminal activities.  A section of federal law, 18 U.S. Code § 1001, addresses this crime.  Here is how this statute begins:

1. Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—

(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;

(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or

(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;

shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years.

Please notice that the statute cited above noted the potential nexus between false statements and terrorism.

Getting back to immigration, aliens who enter the United States without inspection or who enter the United States legally but then violate the term so their immigration status may lie to authorities about their names, their countries of birth and/or countries of citizenship in order to evade detection by immigration law enforcement, to create the appearance that they are entitled to various public assistance programs or to be able to be employed in the United States and to achieve other illegal goals.

Such false claims to United States citizenship is a violation of 18 U.S. Code § 911.  The description of this crime and the punishment for this violation of law is contained in this brief sentence:

Whoever falsely and willfully represents himself to be a citizen of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. 

The primary goal of illegal aliens is to not be arrested and deported (removed from the United States).

It is not uncommon for illegal aliens to make false claims about being United States citizens when they are encountered by law enforcement.  Citizens of countries where Spanish is the predominant language may attempt to pass themselves off as being from Puerto Rico.  Citizens of Caribbean countries such as Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago and St Lucia may make false claims to having been born in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

They may even purchase birth certificates in false names to back up their claims.

Back when I was an INS special agent, I encountered this sort of situation almost routinely.  Some illegal aliens even managed to obtain United States passports under assumed identities.

On May 8, 2017 ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a news release, 15 illegal aliens arrested in East Texas for identity theft that reported on precisely this crime that was allegedly committed by 15 illegal aliens to easily enable them to defeat the E-Verify system by purchasing birth certificates in false names.

Many folks believe that simply mandating the use of E-Verify by all employers would turn off the “job magnet” that draws many illegal aliens to the United States.  

In reality, while E-Verify most certainly should be mandatory, without an adequate number of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel to conduct field investigations, unscrupulous employers could still hire people “off the books” and illegal aliens could defeat the system the way that the 15 aliens reported on in the ICE press release did.

Additionally, more than ever before, the public and our political leaders have developed an extreme fascination with statistics.  Almost every report about immigration includes the supposedly reliable statistic that there are 11 or 12 million illegal aliens in the United States.

Various “think tanks” periodically release reports in which they provide estimates about the size of the illegal alien population both at large and also the number of such aliens who are incarcerated.

Prior the Amnesty of 1986 that was part and parcel of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), it was estimated that roughly one million illegal alien would “emerge from the shadows” under the auspices of that “one time” amnesty program.

By the time the IRCA amnesty program ended more than 3.5 million such aliens stepped out of the “shadows.”

Some may have entered the United States after the estimate was made and then lied about their actual dates of entry into the United States, however, it is likely that for various reasons, such as the issue of aliens making false claims to United States Citizenship the efforts to estimate the true number were way off base.

What what likely blithely ignored then, as well as today, is how the number of such illegal aliens is determined.  Aliens who evade the inspections process at ports of entry do not create a record of arrival as they run the border or, perhaps, stowaway on a ship.

Furthermore, it is not unusual for criminal aliens to make false claims to being citizens of the United States, not unlike those 15 illegal aliens noted previously.

When an alien has been deported and illegally reenters the United States, it is to be expected that in running the individual’s fingerprints, his/her criminal history and immigration history will be discovered.  

However, when an illegal alien who is arrested for the first time lies about his/her citizenship, falsely claiming to be a United States citizen, unless that individual is questioned by someone with an understanding as to how to break such false claims to citizenship, there is a strong possibility that the deception will not be caught.  

Such a criminal alien may well do his/her sentence and then be released into the community without notification being made to ICE because of the mistaken notion that the criminal is a U.S. citizen.

For INS personnel, one of the items on our training curriculum addressed the tactics by which such false claims to United States citizenship could be uncovered- both during questioning and by other means.  

I hope that this class is still being taught at the academy to all ICE personnel, but I am skeptical, considering the way that the Obama administration refused to enforce the immigration law and even turned thousands of criminal aliens loose.

The issue of the training being provided to new ICE agents is one that the current administration must address, and the sooner the better, to make certain that this vital training is mandated for all ICE enforcement personnel.

Irrespective of how ICE agents are trained, this training into breaking false claims to United States citizenship is likely not being provided to any other law enforcement agencies.

Furthermore, where “Sanctuary Cities” are concerned, it is entirely possible that during the arrest and booking process, police and jail officials may simply ask the individual where he was born and dutifully record whatever he says without giving his claimed place of birth or his assertion of being a U.S. citizen a second thought. 

It is, in fact, entirely possible that in such sanctuary cities any information about the number of criminal aliens in custody is not reported at all.

Consequently, not only would this result in criminal aliens not being identified and subsequently deported, but statistics concerning the actual number of criminal aliens who are incarcerated would be skewed with the number being reported being smaller, perhaps significantly smaller than the true number, downplaying the true impact of illegal immigration on the criminal justice system.

While there is no reliable way to know the actual number of illegal aliens present in the United States, (we don’t know what we don’t know) one thing is clear- that number is far greater than has been estimated and the detrimental consequences for America and Americans are far greater than most of our elected “representatives” are willing to admit.

Michael Cutler is a retired Senior Special Agent of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) whose career spanned some 30 years. He served as an Immigration Inspector, Immigration Adjudications Officer and spent 26 years as an agent who rotated through all of the squads within the Investigations Branch. For half of his career he was assigned to the Drug Task Force. He has testified before well over a dozen congressional hearings, provided testimony to the 9/11 Commission as well as state legislative hearings around the United States and at trials where immigration is at issue. He hosts his radio show, “The Michael Cutler Hour,” on Friday evenings on BlogTalk Radio. His personal website is http://michaelcutler.net/.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266702/false-claims-us-citizenship-michael-cutler

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Why Only Trump Can Win in North Korea - Daniel Greenfield

by Daniel Greenfield

It’s time to think outside the box.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam

America is facing the same old bad choices in North Korea.

Either we apply multilateral sanctions hoping that Kim Jong-un, unlike his dad, Saddam Hussein and the Supreme Leader of Iran, will be suitably impressed by having to smuggle his iPhones through three other countries.  Or we build a multilateral coalition to take out its military with minimal civilian casualties and then spend the next decade reconstructing and policing it into a proper member of the United Nations.

Is anyone surprised that after Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans have little appetite for either alternative?

How is it possible that we beat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in less time than it’s taking us to figure out that we can’t even trust the clods of dirt in Afghanistan? Let alone reach a peace deal with them.

But WW2 was a war. It may have been the last war in which we leveraged all the firepower at our disposal to smash an enemy. We don’t fight wars anymore. Instead we’re the world’s policeman.

The military and the police have very different functions. The military destroys a threat. The police keep order. What we’ve been trying and failing to do in Afghanistan is keep order. It’s what we want to do in North Korea. Get that obnoxious kid next door to stop testing nukes every time he has a bad day.

The vocabulary is a dead giveaway. When we call a country a “rogue state” instead of an “enemy”, we’re not saying that it’s a deadly threat to us, but that it’s not behaving the way a member of the global community should. But being a “rogue state” is only a crime to globalists. Our problem isn’t that North Korea is failing to abide by the United Nations Convention on the Treatment of Radishes. It’s the nukes.

To solve a problem, you have to clearly define it because your solution will follow your formulation.

To globalists, the problem is an anti-social withdrawal from the global community. The solution is global “shunning” sanctions followed by a return to the loving arms of the global community.

That’s why the Iran nuke deal disaster happened. The diplomats didn’t care a radioactive fig about Iran’s nukes. They were invested in Iran’s membership in the “international community”. And they got what they wanted. They once got North Korea to sign on the dotted line too. And if you stand downwind of the latest test site with a Geiger counter, you know how that worked out.

If we want to win wars, we should stop being the world’s policeman. And defend ourselves instead.

Multilateral sanctions and multilateral coalitions aren’t our only two options. They’re our only two options if we want to spend our time enforcing the will of an imaginary international community.

The international community is a failed illusion. We’ve sacrificed far too many lives and too much money trying to defend our national interests by the rules of a post-national global order. That tragic mismatch dragged us into a disastrous and horrifying series of stalemates and lost wars. These stalemates, like Afghanistan, never end for the same reason that the cops in Chicago can never just declare victory.

Keeping order is an endless job. Policing means accepting the way things are and trying to keep them from getting too far out of hand while hoping that social conditions will somehow improve.

Police officers serve the public. They are expected to die for civilians. That’s exactly what our soldiers have been expected to do in Iraq, Afghanistan and the other societies that we’ve been policing.

If there’s any president who can actually break the cycle and replace policing with war, it’s President Trump. Trump is the first president in a long time to express skepticism about international commitments and the global order. And to propose that we serve our own national interests instead of serving the international community. And that is what needs to happen in North Korea.

Our old reasons for being in Korea expired with the fall of Communism. South Korea just elected a leftist president who likes North Korea better than he likes us. But that sort of thing has been known to happen. Like American leftists, South Korean leftists believe the stalemate with North Korea is our fault.

They have the right to test out that theory.

Our concern with North Korea is not that it might endanger our shipments of Samsung phones, but that its nuclear weapons will endanger us. Any hostile country with nuclear weapons is a potential threat. But North Korea has repeatedly threatened to use its nuclear weapons and has exported its technology to Islamic terror states. Even if we could shrug at the former, we can’t afford to ignore the latter.

Nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists is the great threat of this century. Imagine the Islamic terror attacks of the last few years if the Jihadists didn’t have to make do with guns, bombs and cars. If we don’t turn off that pipeline in North Korea, Iran and Pakistan, the day will come when we aren’t watching dozens, hundreds or thousands dying on television in the cities of the West, but millions.

Preventing that moment from happening in this century must be our primary strategic objective.

Our post 9/11 engagements drifted from strategic objectives in our national interest that were achievable by military means to international community building projects in which armed force was an obstacle to its diplomatic objectives. That is how Obama’s Afghan surge cost the lives of so many soldiers by tying their hands with rules of engagement that did not allow them to engage the enemy.

President Trump has the opportunity to change all that in North Korea. To win in North Korea, we have to stop thinking in globalist terms. That means discarding talk of “isolating” North Korea. The Norks are already as “isolated” as they’re going to get. Any nation with nuclear weapons and the ability to threaten the United States will always be able to find friends among our enemies.

The trouble with North Korea isn’t that it’s a “Rogue State”. There’s nothing wrong with being a rogue state. We ought to try being one for a change instead of asking the UN for permission to sneeze. The international community is not the problem with North Korea. Nor is international law the solution.

Once we define the problem, we can define the objective. The problem is that North Korea is a dangerous enemy because of its nuclear program. We have two options. Ignore or act.

Plenty of presidents have kicked the nuclear Nork can down the road. Now it’s Trump’s problem.

There will be those around him who will urge him down the same dead end of sanctions, multilateral conferences, condemnations and negotiations. The can will go on rolling down the road. And one fine day, it will go off. Or we can actually end the threat that the North Korean nukes pose to us.

We have grown used to constant military action everywhere around the world. And we have also come to expect that it won’t accomplish anything except to exact an endless cost in money and lives. But those are not wars. They are internationalist police and peacekeeping actions in which we bomb lightly and invade only to rebuild. We are the world’s beat cop with tanks and bombers. It has been a long time since we used the huge warfighting arsenal of our defense industry to actually make war.

Wars don’t have to be long. They do have to be decisive. Their goal isn’t to reunite a lost sheep in the international community, but to destroy the enemy. Since the Cold War ended, we have not truly contemplated a war of destruction. But if we intend to win again, now might be the time to start.

We have spent a great deal of time trying to achieve diplomatic objectives through military means and military objectives through diplomatic means. What we have not done is tackle military objectives through military means. North Korea is not a diplomatic problem, but a military one.

Three options lie before us. We can walk away, withdraw all our forces, limit the potential risk and see what develops. We can destroy North Korea’s nuclear capabilities and as much of the regime infrastructure as we can manage. Or we can continue kicking the can down the road. That is the existing policy and it is the worst of all the three because it exposes us to the most risk with the least upside.

President Trump is the best hope for dropping an existing policy so stupid that only an establishment could cling to it. As an outsider, he is instinctively skeptical of the way things are.

When Alexander the Great was told that to rule he would have to untie a complex knot, he used his sword to cut it apart. The Gordian Knot of our foreign policy looks complicated until you take a sword to it. We can spend the next century trying to make everyone love each other. Or we can fight to win.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266682/why-only-trump-can-win-north-korea-daniel-greenfield

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Indonesia: Free Speech vs. Treason - Jacobus E. Lato

by Jacobus E. Lato

Today, those trying to overthrow the leadership are Islamists intent on unraveling the fabric of a pluralistic society.

• On April 19, the campaign of Jakarta's radicals chanting, "We want a Muslim governor!" paid off, as Ahok was defeated in the gubernatorial election. Exit polls on election day indicated that religion was the main factor behind the voting.
• On May 10, Indonesia's radicals scored a second victory, when Ahok was found guilty of blaspheming Islam and sentenced to two years in prison.
• The verdict came as a surprise even to the prosecutors of the case -- they had requested only a suspended sentence for the offense of "inciting hatred".

In the two decades since the fall of Indonesian President Suharto's 32-year reign in 1998, the use of the accusation of "treason" as a governmental tool to quash political opposition gradually reemerged in the world's largest Muslim-majority country.

Today, however, those trying to overthrow the leadership are Islamists intent on unraveling the fabric of a pluralistic society.

This situation has led to the debate over freedom of speech and the separation of church and state -- or, here, mosque and state.

Four recent rallies in the capital city of Jakarta illustrate the nature of what has become a full-blown controversy. In each case, protesters gathered outside mosques after Friday prayers for what they claim are "spontaneous" demonstrations made necessary by their clerics' lack of financial resources to plan and stage such events. But evidence collected by Indonesian authorities indicates otherwise.

The first such protest took place on October 14, 2016. Its purpose was to demand that criminal proceedings be launched against Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama -- familiarly known as Ahok -- for "blasphemy."

Ahok, a Christian of Chinese descent, was appointed to his position in 2014, when Joko Widodo became president of Indonesia. Hardline Muslim groups argued that a Christian should not be allowed to govern a Muslim-majority city. To back up their claim, they cited the Quran.

Their fury grew even greater when Ahok was running for reelection: he asked fishermen in Pulau Seribu not to be "deceived" by politicians using the Quranic verse, al-Maidah 51 ("...do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies"), to dissuade them from supporting him.

Although Ahok subsequently apologized for his statement, he was put on trial for blasphemy. Thousands of Islamists, shouting "Burn Ahok!" and "We want a Muslim governor!", marched from the Istiqlal Mosque through the city. This ostensible eruption of emotions, according to deputy head of the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam, or FPI), had nothing to do with the upcoming gubernatorial election. It was, he said, religiously motivated. However, the presence at the rally of former House Speaker Amin Rais indicated that politics played just as big a role as faith.

The second rally took place less than three weeks later, on November 4. According to the head of the FPI, some 7.5 million Muslims turned out that day. At the end of it, one protester had died of an asthma attack and two police trucks had been set on fire by an angry mob.

Hours before the third rally, on December 2, police arrested 11 people on suspicion of treason for trying to overthrow the government. Among these were: the daughter of former President Suharto; prominent economist and activist Sri Bintang Pamungkas and two brothers, Jamran and Rizal Khobar, both members of the Islamic Students Association, a group responsible for an attack on security officials during the previous rally.

In addition to the allegation of treason, Pamungkas was detained over social media posts, particularly a YouTube video from the previous month. Rizal and Jamran were accused of violating Indonesia's 2008 Electronic Information and Transactions Law.

Ahead of the fourth rally in question, on March 31, a second batch of arrests was carried out by police. Among those detained was Muhammad Al Khaththath, a leader of the hardline Islamic People's Forum.

Indonesian Islamists listen to a speech by an imam during a protest against Jakarta governor Ahok, on March 31, 2017 in Jakarta, Indonesia. (Image source: Ed Wray/Getty Images)

Although the case can be made, as it is in the West, for distinguishing between treason and the right to criticize one's government, the issue in Indonesia is currently more complex, due to the extremist religious agenda of the opposition. Rather than looking to their religious leaders to determine matters of faith, many are using Islam as a political weapon, and breaking laws that were written to protect the very minorities who are now being treated as second-class citizens.

On April 19, the campaign of Jakarta's radicals, chanting "We want a Muslim governor!" paid off, as Ahok was defeated in the gubernatorial election. On May 10, Indonesia's radicals scored a second victory, when Ahok was found guilty of blaspheming Islam and sentenced to two years in prison, effective immediately.

The verdict, which came as a surprise even to the prosecutors of the case, who had requested only a suspended sentence for the offense of "inciting hatred," was handed down by a five-judge panel of the North Jakarta District Court.

One of the judges, Abdul Rosvad, explained the decision by saying, "...[A]s a public officer, the defendant should have known that religion is a sensitive issue so he should have avoided talking about [it]." Rosvad also denied allegations that Ahok's arrest, trial and imprisonment were politically motivated.

"This is a pure criminal case," he said.

However, the popular Christian governor was defeated by rival Anies Baswedan, a Muslim, and exit polls on election day indicated that religion was the main factor behind the voting.

Dr. Melissa Crouch, of Australia's University of New South Wales, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the verdict should not have come as a surprise. "To be accused of blasphemy in Indonesia is effectively to be found guilty," she said. "This gives a lot of power to those -- such as religious leaders -- who may make the initial complaint to police regarding blasphemy charges."

Ahok's lawyers say they will be appealing the verdict.

Jacobus E. Lato is a writer and former editor, based in Surabaya, Indonesia.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10358/indonesia-free-speech-treason

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Top Private School Brings in Skirts for Boys Amidst ‘Surge’ in ‘Trans Children’ - Virginia Hale

by Virginia Hale

One of Britain’s top private schools is bringing in ‘gender-neutral’ uniforms that would allow boys to wear skirts, as teachers report growing numbers of children ‘questioning their gender identity’.

The move by Highgate School in north London comes as activist pupils at schools across the country are demanding ‘gender-neutral’ bathroom facilities, a ban on terms they deem ‘sexist’, and for teachers to use gender-neutral pronouns such as “they”.

“This generation is really questioning being binary in the way we look at things,” headteacher Adam Pettitt told The Sunday Times.

Separate uniforms for boys and girls will be scrapped under the plans, and pupils at the £6,790 per term secondary school are being consulted on a mix-and-match dress code.

Items included in the new dress code won’t be linked to sex, noted Pettitt, who told the newspaper: “We are asking [pupils], should it be called uniform number one and uniform number two?”

Highgate’s current uniform policy allows female pupils to wear trousers, dark blue jackets, and ties but boys can’t choose to wear the grey pleated skirts that make up part of the girls’ uniform.

Pettitt said some former pupils at the school, whose alumni include the cricketer Phil Tufnell and the poet T.S. Eliot, have opposed the changes.

“They write in and say if you left children to their own devices they would grow up differently and you are promoting the wrong ideas.”

But the headmaster added that if boys choose to wear skirts, then “if [as a result] they feel happier and more secure in who they are, it must be a good thing.”

Highgate is set to hold a conference for dozens of schools titled The Developing Teenager next month, at which one of the topics to be discussed is how teachers should handle growing pressure from pupils to scrap the “old fashioned” idea that there are two sexes.

The Sunday Times reported figures show a surge in the number of children wanting to change gender, with more than 2,000 minors referred to north London’s Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust last year, compared to just 100 when it opened eight years ago.

But critics warn the rush by schools to implement gender-neutral policies being demanded by activists risked encouraging “copycat” behaviour amongst children, fuelled by social media and the internet.

As it was reported in 2015 that 80 primary school-aged children a year were being branded transgendered, experts revealed they were emerging in “clusters” – in schools where the fad had taken off.

A study by Mark Zucker at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, found that transgenderism was more prominent and persistent amongst children when promoted by adults.

Researchers observed that children who saw therapists and others in authority who assume they belong to the opposite sex can actually become more distressed, exacerbating their “gender dysphoric identity”.


Virginia Hale

Source: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/05/15/top-school-skirts-boys-trans-children/

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Trump Drops Bunker Buster on Comey and the Deep State - Geoffrey P. Hunt

by Geoffrey P. Hunt

Comey’s reputation as an even-handed government lawyer isn’t as fair-and-balanced as it would seem at first blush

For all of his stage-crafted gravitas and preening, James Comey was a bantamweight, yearning to be anointed with the heavyweight crown by securing a lifetime sinecure from the Deep State.

After all, his most prominent prosecution in his career as U.S. Attorney was convicting Martha Stewart -- not for actual insider securities trading, but for lying to the FBI and misleading her investors by proclaiming her innocence. No matter, Comey the hi-octane prosecutor saved the securities industry from the ravages of Martha -- the master manipulator of stuffed endive ginger dip.

And with that coveted scalp, later as assistant AG under John Ashcroft, Comey appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to be the special prosecutor who nailed Dick Cheney’s aide Scooter Libby -- not for the actual unmasking of Valerie Plame, a purported undercover CIA operative -- but for obstructing the investigation. Fitzgerald, and Comey knew from the beginning the identity of the leaker, Colin Powell’s assistant Richard Armitage. While both Armitage and Powell continued their duplicitous silent assent to damaging W’s second term, Comey did nothing to stop this miscarriage.

Comey’s reputation as an even-handed government lawyer isn’t as fair-and-balanced as it would seem at first blush. His participation in the whitewash of the Clinton Whitewater cover up, when he was assistant counsel for the Senate Whitewater Committee, was accompanied by a simultaneous assertion that the Clintons engaged in “a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.”

Later, as U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, his Vidi aquam over the corrupt Bill Clinton pardon of Marc Rich, an alleged quid pro quo for campaign contributions, betrayed Comey’s own role as a prosecutor working for Rudy Giuliani’s successful conviction of Rich’s tax evasion fifteen years earlier.

To what end was Comey’s convenient and cynical equivocations? Mere warm-ups for his disgraceful tenure at the FBI.

Comey’s fitness report while heading the FBI is a compendium of incompetence, and dissembling, beyond his blockade-running interference for Hillary’s email felonies, and AG Loretta Lynch’s deliberately compromising encounter with Bill Clinton on the Phoenix airport tarmac:

• The FBI ignored the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston Marathon bombing.
• The FBI ignored U.S. Army psychiatrist and jihadist Nidal Hasan before he murdered 31 people at Fort Hood.
• The FBI ignored the San Bernardino terrorist killers Farook and Malik; then in an unforced fiasco bullied Apple for a needless unlocking key to the killers’ IPhone.
• An FBI agent was actually following the Garland, Texas shooters without notifying local law enforcement that armed men were about to carry out a terrorist attack.
• The FBI ignored Orlando nightclub massacre terrorist Omar Mateen, while under intermittent surveillance, whose lies to the FBI were known by the FBI interrogators.
• The FBI has done zero investigation into who leaked classified info on Michael Flynn, nor the unmasking of more than a thousand private U.S. citizens, along with who spied on Trump and members of Congress.
• The FBI has demurred in investigating the Clinton Foundation

Overcoming his record in hardcore prosecutions of first-order crimes, Comey became an accomplished sifter of fly ash, alternating hiding behind investigation protocols when politically convenient, then asserting prosecutorial zeal when personally advantageous.

For all of the dubious claims that Comey “hated the Clintons’”, and “discomforted the Democrats”, his own carefully constructed slow-walking misdirection methods made him indispensable to the Clintons’ political viability, while allowing them to evade criminal indictments. Until Trump fired him, Comey also had been the Democrats’ most productive enabler for subverting the Trump presidency, by creating a persistent cloud of innuendo, promoting interminable suspicions of unspecified, undefined, and unsubstantiated misdeeds committed by unidentified perpetrators.

Still, Comey elicits undeserved sympathy. Michael Barone says untimely intersections with the Clintons have rendered him another hapless victim, “Can something be said in defense of Comey? He was put in a terrible position by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Obama Justice Department.” 

Baloney.

It is a myth that Comey is a dispassionate balanced arbiter of justice. As WSJ’s Kimberly Strassel pointed out,

“So what should an honor-bound FBI director do in such a conflicted situation? Call it out. Demand that Ms. Lynch recuse herself and insist on an appropriate process to ensure public confidence. Resign, if need be. Instead Mr. Comey waited until the situation had become a crisis, and then he ignored all protocol to make himself investigator, attorney, judge and jury.”

Convincing the Deep State to trust him as “investigator, attorney, judge, and jury” is precisely how Comey measured himself for a lifetime Kevlar wardrobe. Comey bet that the Deep State power of the federal government rested with the Democrats, confident Hillary would shake off the tarnish from the email scandal, Benghazi, and her string of unindicted crimes and misdemeanors. 

But Comey didn’t count on Donald Trump. Comey thought Trump a fool, more blusterer than disrupter, with an untethered temperament, and not a threat.

Instead Trump dropped his own bunker buster MOAB on Comey’s underground warrens, ending Comey’s sinecure, while unmasking the Democrats reliance on Comey to facilitate their malfeasant undermining of the president.

Trump’s manner in firing Comey, by all conventional assessments, has been a crippling political communications debacle. It is hard to imagine Trump deliberately intending to create such a firestorm to accompany a seemingly unremarkable personnel move that on the surface should have been endorsed by all sides of the political establishment.

Still, the collateral political damage that Trump brought upon himself in the manner of getting rid of Comey doesn’t negate the need to have done it, and thereby commencing the war against the Deep State. Trump had to start it, somehow, someplace. Comey was as good as any place to begin, maybe the best.

Mercilessly Trump fired the first consequential blow against the Deep State. That’s why we voted for him.

Now Trump needs to finish what he started. Cleaning up his communications farce in the meantime would only be a bonus. After all, we can’t savor the disruption, and its aftershock, if we have to apologize for it.

Geoffrey P. Hunt

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/05/trump_drops_bunker_buster_on_comey_and_the_deep_state.html

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